Texas Bluebonnet Award Voting

Voting may take place anytime during the month of January. Remember, votes from your site must be tabulated and submitted by midnight on January 31, so allow enough time for the process.

You have the option of letting your students vote online. If you prefer to use the traditional paper ballots, you must prepare one for each student. Either duplicate our sample ballot or design your own. If you design your own, include a place for children to mark their grade levels; you will be asked to report the number of voters by grade level as well as the number of votes for each book.

Each eligible child may vote one time. Eligible voters are those who:

are enrolled in grades 3-6 in a public, private, or home school program;

are enrolled in a registered school, or participate in the reading program at their registered public library;

have read (or heard read aloud) at least five of the Master List books.

Each institution will conduct voting either by paper ballots or through our new online voting site. Instructions for each are below:

Conducting online voting

Select your institution from the drop-down list. When the voting pages are activated you will see the voting buttons appear at the bottom of the screen, if your institution is registered. Please note that these buttons will become active when voting begins on January 1.

Click on “Teacher Registration” to register each teacher whose class will be voting at your institution, and be sure to register them for the appropriate grade level they teach. If a teacher teaches multiple grade levels they will need to be registered once for each grade they teach. At public libraries, the children’s librarian should enter their name once for each grade level, or you can simply enter "Librarian" for grade 3, "Librarian" for grade 4, and so on. Please note, if you make any errors, you can click on "Edit" to change the librarian's name or grade level, or "Delete" to delete registered teacher completely (Note: You may only delete a teacher if no votes have been cast yet for that teacher's class).If the faculty at your school would like to cast votes for fun, you can select "Faculty" as the grade level for a class, and assign any name as the "teacher" of that class. (Faculty votes will not be included in final voting totals submitted for your school).

Click on “Student Voting” to begin casting votes. This will bring up a list of all nominated books, and the student will click on the image or title of their favorite book. The next page will ask them to enter their first name, last initial, teacher’s name, and student ID number. Note: Student ID numbers are entered to assure that duplicate votes have not been cast by a student. If your students do not have an ID number or if you prefer not to use their student ID for any reason, you can assign each voter a unique number or they may use their library card number (at public libraries). This number is not used by TLA for any other purpose other than detecting duplicate votes.

Once a vote is cast, the site will return to the book selection screen to allow the next vote to be cast.

Once ALL votes have been cast at your institution, the librarian will submit the votes for the entire institution by clicking “Submit Ballots to TLA.” Instructions can be found under "Submitting Ballots" tab.

Conducting paper ballots voting

Either duplicate our sample ballot or design your own. If you design your own, include a place for children to mark their grade levels; you will be asked to report the number of voters by grade level as well as the number of votes for each book.

You will be responsible for tallying the votes from your site and reporting the total number of votes for each title and the numbers of youngsters voting at each grade level.

Report your total votes online. Instructions for doing so are found under "Submitting Votes" tab. You do not need to mail the hard copy ballots as a backup.

Vote totals must be reported to the TBA office by midnight, January 31. Be sure to allow enough time to complete this process.

Submit voting totals online: select your institution from the drop-down list. If your institution is registered, you will see the voting buttons appear at the bottom of the screen. (Please note, these buttons will not be active until voting begins on January 1).

Click on "Submit Ballots" button.

Enter your institution's PIN number. If you do not know your PIN, click "Forgot PIN" and it will be displayed for you.

Click "Go to Ballot."

Enter the vote totals for each book (if you conducted voting online, these fields will already be filled in for you). Use the “Tab” key to move from box to box. The system will automatically total the votes in the “Total of Votes Cast” box.

Enter the number of voters by grade level at the bottom of the ballot. The total number of voters should match the total number of votes cast. If the totals do not match, you will be given the opportunity to make corrections. (Again, if you conducted online voting, these totals will all be filled in for you).

Enter the name of the person filling out the ballot.

Click on “Submit.”

Print your confirmation page for your records. You will also be sent an email with the voting totals you submitted.Please retain a record of the voting totals for your institution in the event that a problem occurs during vote submission.